The Substance.
I figured The Substance would be scary so I tried to peer pressure my boyfriend into seeing it with me. Our plan was to go see My Old Ass (another great movie, where a character played by Aubrey Plaza benevolently haunts her younger self), but I insisted we see The Substance instead because I could see My Old Ass by myself—I didn’t want to see The Substance alone.
“But I want to see My Old Ass,” he said, and I insisted that he would like The Substance more, showed him the trailer, which he watched and then said, again, “But I want to see My Old Ass.” We went to see My Old Ass (which was worth seeing, very wholesome, very bi, very memorable). The night before though, I went to see The Substance.
The theatre was packed, so I had to sit in the front row, crane back to look at this screen that would tell a story that I vaguely got the gist of from the trailer, but had no real understanding of up top. The Substance is about a woman who just turned 50 (played by Demi Moore), who—after she finds out she’s getting aged out of her lifetime job as a TV aerobics instructor —injects herself with a serum to make herself younger. Except the weird thing about The Substance, which makes it a stranger, arguably more creative film than all of the other movies about becoming a younger version of yourself is that the character doesn’t just magically become younger, she splits in two. Now, she has an older and younger self, and she has to alternate between them, keep them both alive, if either of them is going to be able to live freely—young or old—in the world. It is this balance which makes the movie way more interesting; it’s the consideration of what we owe to our younger and our older selves, how we can’t banish either version of who we are completely.
This split causes all kinds of issues and then all of a sudden the movie gets pretty body horror-y— I don’t like gore, but by then, I was already invested. The film wasn’t as scary as I thought, it wasn’t dark for the sake of being dark, it was more dark in the way that a lot of post-Covid movies have been dark, as if—now that we’ve been confronted with something like the pandemic, something we didn’t foresee—artists are more prone to exploring all of the hidden corners of life, more prone to pushing things into the unlikely, into the surreal. The Substance reminded me of Yorgos Lanthimos’ newest film Kinds of Kindness. After watching Poor Things, which I found weird and hilarious, I was excited to see his new movie, but if Poor Things was weird and hilarious in a more mainstream kind of way, Kinds of Kindness was more weird and less hilarious in an experimental artist kind of way. Lanthimos, in this film, does what Coralie Fargeat does in The Substance: pushes and pushes and pushes until things become impossible to predict and even harder to look away from. I remember thinking—when watching that film—that it was both very unsettling and very bold. Maybe this post-Covid genre of taking things to the brink, of squeezing all of the potential oddities out of a situation, pushing everything to its strangest, most fucked up conclusion, can bring us some relief. If trauma, as Freud said, is traumatic because it’s surprising then maybe we are attempting to heal ourselves by trying to anticipate every possible surprise, creating them in our art, so that we can feel more prepared, like nothing—after we’ve explored so many dark nooks and crannies—can spook us.
Anyway, The Substance didn’t leave me spooked so much as it left me a little queasy and disoriented. It was dark-weird like Kinds of Kindness is dark-weird, like Midsommar is dark-weird, all movies that didn’t leave me feeling good but that I couldn’t stop thinking about. I’m in a time (maybe we’re all in a time) where I want to see newer things, weirder things, more open surreal disorienting world-changing things happening in art and in life. Maybe it’s because in a few weeks I’ll be 30 (!), but I want both the consistency of the things in life I’ve been working toward (a good job, good partner, good friends) and the surprise that creativity can afford us, moments where we gasp, whisper, “Oh my god.”
When I came back from seeing The Substance—I’d come to my boyfriend’s equipped with snacks and ready to stay all weekend because of Hurricane Helene, but even now that it’d passed (wreaking havoc in places that had been less well-warned), I’d stayed —when I came back from seeing this weird and unsettling movie, I didn’t know what to say. It was good? It had changed me? I told him he should’ve seen it? The next day, we watched My Old Ass and sobbed. As the credits rolled, my boyfriend said something like, “Now this—this is what I wanted to see.”
Image: Mubi
